David Gauke is a former Justice Secretary and was an independent candidate in South-West Hertfordshire at the 2019 general election.
Prisons are back in the headlines, which is very rarely good news.
The particular focus is on prisoners being released earlier than they should be, after several high- profile cases have drawn attention to the matter. These occurrences have undoubtedly been an embarrassment for the prison service, the MOJ, and the Government as a whole, and left the public asking what on earth has been going on.
The current furore begins with the case of Hadush Kebatu.
If there was a case that had the potential to be most damaging, it was this one. For weeks over the summer, the news was dominated by protests outside an Epping hotel where asylum seekers were housed.
The protesters argued that the presence of asylum seekers at that hotel put local women and girls at risk, because one of the residents had sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl.
At the time, such claims had to be hedged by the word “allegedly” but in September the accused was convicted and received a 12 month sentence.
Kebatu was that offender.
If opposition to asylum hotels was one issue of the summer, deportation of foreign offenders was another.
With our prisons overcrowded, all parties have recognised that we could reduce some of the pressure by deporting more foreign national offenders, and deporting them earlier in their sentence.
The extent that this is the answer can be overstated (approximately a third of foreign national offenders in our prisons are on remand, and it is not reasonable to deport somebody prior to conviction or sentencing) but the Independent Sentencing Review (which I chaired) proposed earlier deportations than is currently the case and the then Justice Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, responded going further still.
That is all very well, but if a foreign national offender who is supposed to be deported is simply released onto the streets, any deportation policy is an irrelevance.
Of course, this is what initially happened with Kebatu.
He was released from Chelmsford prison on the wrong date, much to his surprise and apparently against his will, and with no provision for what was to happen next. Rather unwittingly, Kebatu briefly became a fugitive from justice until he was re-arrested and subsequently deported.
But now the media had been alerted to the issue of offenders being released earlier than they should be. When those cases involved foreign national offenders and sex offenders, you had something that understandably created outrage.
Brahim Kaddour-Cherif, imprisoned for trespass with intent to steal but with a conviction for indecent exposure, met this criteria and his case gained more attention because of David Lammy’s failure to mention it when being questioned about wrongful releases at Prime Minister’s Questions.
Before turning to the causes of these problems, and how they should be addressed, it is worth setting out a couple of points of context. First, releases in error are not a new feature but they have increased in number recently.
There were generally about 50 a year for a long time, but there have been 91 cases in the period of April to October this year. Second, although concerning (especially the increase) and symptomatic of wider problems, these errors rarely create a risk for the general public. In some cases, the release occurs just a handful of days before they were going to be released any way.
In almost all cases, the offender assumes they have been released at the correct time and does not make themselves difficult to find and are quickly picked up. Of the 91 cases in April to October, 89 were returned to custody and only two are at large (there is a good chance they will be abroad).
To put it another way, these cases are very different – and less serious – to offenders escaping from prisons or absconding from open prisons when prisoners are deliberately evading justice. There is much wrong in our prison system, but those numbers are much better than they were. In 1995/96, for example, there were 52 escapes from prison and 956 absconds, in 2024/25 there were 12 and 57 respectively.
This is not to deny that the increase in release errors is not a problem. It is a consequence of a system running hot, with little spare capacity, and inexperienced officers placed under pressure.
The lack of capacity means that prisoners are often being moved from one institution to another as the numbers are juggled to free up places in reception prisons, with every move creating plenty of administrative work.
There were 57,000 prison releases last year, but for more moves within the prisons system, all of which has to be processed.
The sentencing system is itself complex.
A prisoner will get a sentence and a release point, but different offences have different release points. The Government had no choice but to introduce an early release scheme in September 2024 but this scheme – and the various exclusions to it – has added to the complexity.
Very often, offenders will have multiple convictions and will serve concurrent sentences, which creates scope for error as the system fails to pick up every conviction. Even if mistakes are avoided, the time taken to manage a complex sentencing regime is time that could be better spent elsewhere.
A further practical problem is that it is not uncommon for offenders to use multiple aliases, and the system sometimes does not bring all those identities together. For example, a prisoner may be known by one name in the prison system but there is a remand warrant issued in another name.
This touches on the biggest problem and the cause of recent problems with high profile cases – one part of the criminal justice system does not communicate sufficiently with another. A warrant may have been issued by a court, but not shared with the prison. A possible cause of the increase in errors is that the Home Office, taking a more aggressive approach in deporting illegal immigrants, is issuing more detention warrants with a view to deportation but this information is not reaching the prisons in time for it to be acted upon.
What to do about it?
Not running our system quite so hot would certainly help.
Technology could be used to assist with the sentencing calculations but, more importantly, ensuring that all the information within the criminal justice system is shared in a more effective and timely manner. (By the way, digital ID could be invaluable in the context of offenders known by multiple names.)
And we should look to move towards a simpler sentencing regime, as we advocated in the Independent Sentencing Review. These are not overnight solutions, but we can make progress.
Finally, my biggest concern over all of this is that it proves to be a distraction from a bigger issue.
I can imagine that in recent weeks the focus of ministers and officials has been on this subject given the publicity it has attracted.
The issue should not be dismissed, but when it comes to protecting the public and reducing crime, a far more important matter is strengthening the capacity of the probation service. There is a huge amount of work that needs to be done, and the service is going to need to deal much more effectively with a workload that is going to increase by tens of thousands in the next few months.
If the publicity about release errors proves to distract the Ministry of Justice from that issue, we will have a much bigger problem than the high-profile cases we have seen in recent weeks.
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